Monday, January 27, 2014

Lamingtons; An Australian treat Made the American Way

Today we had hoped to learn a bit more about Australia and enjoy another fun snack from the land down under.

I read aloud a few more chapters from Odd and The Frost Giants and then we read Are We There Yet? and a short story or two from Stories of the Billabong. Are We There Yet? was such a cute story about an Australian family traveling all around Australia for a few months. The boys and I really enjoyed it.

We listened to a few videos on Youtube so that we could hear the didgeridoo. We enjoyed this one and this one.

We made an American Version of Lamingtons, an Australian snack, that we thought sounded yummy.

From the books we've read and the recipes we consulted Lamingtons are basically yellow cake squares that have been dipped in chocolate and covered with coconut.

To make our Lamingtons a bit more simple for the boys to make we decided to make yellow cupcakes, top them with chocolate frosting and sprinkle with coconut. While not authentic, I figure they will still give us a good idea of what Lamingtons taste like.

The boys enjoyed them but aren't a big fan of coconut so more often than not they picked the coconut off!

We continued on with our school day and started composing a letter for our Worldwide Culture Exchange. We're swapping a box of goodies with a family from England and so we wrote them a letter telling them about our town, state and region. We'll be picking up some goodies to put in the box as well.

For math today the boys all had a roll and cover sheet. Evan added sums up to 12 and the older two boys had worksheets that multiplied up to products of 72 (we have 9 and even 12 sided dice so we can practice ALL our facts this way!). After they were finished the older boys went on to do a math minute. I was nervous for them since we haven't attempted a math minute in almost a week! Alec passed his two times tables with several seconds to spare and Ian managed to get 14 of the 21 facts for the five's times tables. I was very proud of them!

Evan had another sight words sheet and I let him choose how he wanted to work with those sight words. I told him he could spell them out with magnet tiles, write them, stamp them using my stamps and ink, write them in shaving cream-- pretty much anything he wanted and yet he choose to use the magnets since it's easiest!

Once all the boys were done I had one last language arts project-- we separated the common nouns from the proper nouns after we had a quick discussion on what they were. Alec seemed to pick up on this distinction pretty quickly but Ian and Evan struggled a bit more. I told them we'd keep working on it.

Once their work was done they ran off to play. It was another fun filled day!